YOUR SPACE: Couple bringing Cajun concoctions to Territory Days

Meet Fat Daddy and Hot Mama.

They are good ol' Louisiana folk who found themselves plopped in the suburbs of Colorado Springs without their Cajun potions.

"We couldn't find our good food," says Richard Kennedy, aka Fat Daddy. So, the dark-haired Cajun and his "Hot Mama" blond wife, Sheila, started mixing up seasonings in the kitchen of their golf course-adjacent home in Woodmen Hills.

While golfers chip and putt, they stir, sift and taste.

Otherwise, it looks and acts like a typical two-story suburban home, even with the scale on the kitchen table to weigh beans and the surgical mask on the breakfast bar to filter inhalation of hot pepper flakes.

The dining room doubles as stockroom for their dry-mix bean and black-eyed pea products (fatdaddysspice.com).

"Never in my life," says Richard, 44, a regional account manager for Sherwin-Williams paint stores, "did I dream I'd be selling barbecue sauce and spices."

Ditto for Sheila, 43. She's a manicurist. Now her pretty fingers count beans.

When the couple and their daughter, Hannah, 10, moved here two years ago for his promotion, they had visions of weekends spent skiing in the Rockies.

Instead, they sell their Cajun concoctions at flea markets and festivals, like this weekend's Territory Days.

The couple date back to the same high school ... where they didn't date. Richard got his hair cut at the shop where she did nails, and the busybodies at the salon set them up after their divorces.

A year ago, he took out a thousand bucks from his 401(k) to fund his products. The worst-case scenario was that he'd have enough for a lifetime, right? "More like for a year," he says.

In the first three months, the couple sold 300 bottles of $5.75 sauces and 2,000 bottles of $3.75 spices.

"We had repeat customers. I said, 'Hey, we've got something here,'" Richard says.

He confirmed it was good by looking in the trash at a company event where he cooked up his stuff. People cleaned their plates.

He laces the barbecue sauces with A&W Root Beer, Mountain Dew, Orange Crush and Red Bull.

"Seasoning is a lot easier to perfect than the barbecue sauce," he says.

He has built-in testers who say "too hot," "too salty" - or "just right."

Richard's teen daughter by a previous marriage gave him his trademark nickname. "They just picked up and started calling me 'Fat Daddy," he says.

In case you're wondering, he doesn't live up to the portly part of his name. He says he lost 15 pounds while recovering from a spill a few months ago in Breckenridge. He wasn't skiing; he slipped on a patch of ice and broke his back.